281841 - attachments not cached when working in online mode

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Jack Cooney]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: version 1.0 (20041206)

When reading mail from my IMAP server with "offline inbox reading" disabled,
Thunderbird insists on fetching attachments again and again, rather than
attempting to cache them locally.

An obvious workaround is to work with "offline inbox reading" enabled, but I
can't quite see why, in a given Thunderbird session, you can't cache attachments
 so that they are only downloaded once.  You really start to notice this issue
when someone sends you a gigantic attachment.  Every time you (a) look at the
email or (b) save the attachment, Thunderbird goes and gets a fresh copy from
the IMAP server.  This just seems wrong somehow.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. send yourself a large attachment
2 [review]. connect via IMAP to your mail server, and make sure that Thunderbirds's
"offline inbox reading" feature is disabled (Account Options -> Account ->
Offline and Disk Space).
3. click on the message with the large attachment.  Watch Thunderbird download
the attachment.
4. try to save the attachment and watch Thunderbird download it again.
5. read another message and then return to the message with the large
attachment.  Watch Thunderbird download it again.



Expected Results:  
Found that the attachment had already been seen and fetch it from some sort of
local cache?

Comment 1

[Atahualpa Jones]

Ahh so that's what this option does. I think this is really a case of a very bad
name. First "Inbox" refers to only a single folder and not all of them which
could be present on an IMAP folder and second the "when I am working offline"
part made me think it only has something to do when I switch the client into
offline mode, which I never do (TB should get rid of this altogether anyway,
it's been taught in UI for quite a while that modes are bad)

The option should be renamed to something better. The functionality that I wish
is that every mail that I read is automatically cached on TB... I don't want to
cache all of my mails, because the older ones are just a waste of disk space as
it's unlikely that I ever access them again.
This option should come with a box that leaves you the choice to cache mails for
3 days, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, a year or always and TB should automatically
uncache mails that exceed this limit (except when flagged of course).

Currently to make mails persistent I flag them and then in File>Offline I select
"get flagged messages".

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
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Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.